Tag Archives: fashion

So, it’s been a mere three and a half months since I started my new job.

To be perfectly accurate, it was 105 days.

I got this new job, remember, because I am a human bucket of awesome. Remember? I started working as a writer and “social media manager” for a company that makes dresses. Cool huh? Someone was actually going to pay me MONEY to post on Facebook and write descriptions of clothes.

Cool.

Yep. Well, 105 days later, and that bridge was burned in such a way that you’d think that raging inferno was caused by some old Irish woman’s cow. Burned that sucker to the ground, I did. Then salted the earth so nothing could grow again.

This is not a very easy post for me to write, because I want so badly to be snide and funny and quippy and silly. I want to joke about the trashy little office with perpetual stains on the floors and walls. I want to talk about the crazy attitudes and bemoaning and whining. I want to joke about the fact that so many people think feathers are a good embellishment, or the utterly terrible writing that I fixed on the website. I want to talk about the girl who mispronounced her own name (seriously, it was not a name with alternate pronunciations) or the girl who inexplicably seemed to form all of her sentences into questions.

We make clothes here?

Why are you asking me, you’ve been here for years, dumbass.

But I can’t really make too many jokes, really. And not just because I don’t want to trash my former employer and get sued all to hell, which I certainly do not.

Let me just tell the story.

The day that I interviewed, I had that cat-sees-a-ghost moment. You know what I am talking about, if you’ve ever had a cat (or a dog, probably). When you’re sitting there, minding your own business, watching old episodes of One Tree Hill on DVD reading the classics, when suddenly your cat is staring at the wall. He’s pissed, too. Whatever is there is dangerous, and scary. You can’t see it, but you can feel it. You should flee. But that’s ridiculous. You go back to Lucas and Nathan and that damn Dan Scott Miss Havisham and Pip and try to shake it off, but danger is there, somewhere. You know it.

This happened when the Beast rolled into the room to interview me. She poured into her seat as if her skin was stuffed with play-doh instead of bones and muscle. When she opened her mouth, she barked.

I wanted to scram out of there. But this job seemed great, and I thought I was resisting for the wrong reasons.

I was offered. I accepted. I started. I enjoyed.

I paddled forward and wrote and posted and learned. Some people made me cock my head to the side, others made me smile. I was new to an office, new to a 40-hour-week a job, I hadn’t held a 9-5 gig…. ever. All my full-time jobs in my whole adult life had always been off hours and always included weekends. This was new.

I was having a blast.

It lasted 65 days. Exactly 65 days in, and 40 days before I lost it, this ship turned, and it turned on a dime.

I feel pretty certain that describing it in full detail would be boring as complete and utter hell. It would also be impossible, as I am not really sure what all happened. But I know the date. And on that day, out of nowhere, the screaming started. And it never. stopped. On that day, the Beast opened her massive jowls and uttered a robust roar of anger, over an error so minor that at the time, her howl literally made me jump because I was not expecting it. To say it was disproportionate to the situation at hand isn’t just an understatement, it’s a false statement. It wasn’t disproportionate, it was absurd.

It was more absurd in light of the fact that I actually had not made any mistake, and in fact, the person who HAD made an error tried in vain to accept the blame. The Beast would have none of it. I swear, she glanced around the room to make sure all eyes were upon her before unleashing a bellow of insults at me, then walking away as swiftly as a woman that vast could possibly go.

I was left with my mouth hanging wide.

I was livid.

I tried the rest of the day to calm myself down. We were in the middle of a project, and everyone was getting yelled at sooner or later. Maybe it was just my turn.

The next day, the roar was ten times as loud at two other poor souls, and I thought, sweet relief, I’m out of the line of fire. That lasted roughly five hours.

Then I was wrong, and awful, and terrible. Y’all. I cried in front of my immediate supervisor. I told him I wasn’t going to make it through this nonsense. I told Jim I wasn’t going to make it through this nonsense.

But I did. For 40 more days.

And in those 40 days, what happened was hard to explain. The snide looks. The comments. The “what are you doing?” I got assigned to a project I wasn’t qualified to work on. I stayed late while others clocked out at 5 p.m. on the dot. I was dismissed. I was sneered at. I carried on, thinking, huh…

My intention was to just push through, get some experience, and move on. I mean, wasn’t that my intention from the start? To take the experience from this job and move it into a new career opportunity.

Then, the ghost that the cat saw finally made itself known.

Someone from another department had picked up one of my responsibilities, without my knowledge. They started posting to one of our social media sites. I know that when I started, I was excited about what seemed like this unreal opportunity to get paid to post on Facebook. But as it turned out, there was legitimate marketing strategy behind the postings. Nothing was done just to be done, like when you punch up a picture of the scone you’re about to devour and type in “YUM SCONES!!” When you implement a social media marketing strategy, everything from the post itself to the language to the time of day you post to how long your sentences are to your tags are part of a plan. Willy nilly is not allowed.

For whatever reason, someone else was posting. And they weren’t following any of the protocols.

I sent out an e-mail.

There was only one way that someone else was posting, and that was if they had obtained passwords from the Beast. And I certainly didn’t want to mess with that, so my e-mail was professional. Hey, here’s a heads up, here is our marketing plan. Here are some tips to make sure what you post is following the plan we’ve been implementing for the past few months.

Yeah, the cat jumped all over that ghost.

The Beast took the opportunity to let me know that I do a terrible job (not true) and I post terrible boring things (not true) that no one likes (not accurate at all) and so she told someone else to post. I pointed out that we’d actually made a fair amount of gains in the social media realm, gains that could be counted in the forms of likes and follows and average views. Her reply? “Matter of opinion.” Keep in mind that telling me that was borderline stupid, it was a matter of math. One plus one is two, that makes more people following you on social media. That’s not an opinion.

But…

She made a point to make that reply go to all. She made it a point to write all of this — this belittling nonsense about my terrible performance that was not at all terrible — in a reply all to everyone who had seen my original e-mail about how we are working to best utilize social media as a marketing tool. In short, I reached out to collaborate with co-workers. She reached out to tell me I’m a damn idiot.

Shake it off. Shake it off.

I shook it off for three more days.

Until I woke up on a Monday morning, and a woman with zero supervisory powers whatsoever over me had sent me a similar e-mail, on the same string that I had originally started. “If you can’t handle this job, we’ll do it for you,” she wrote. “You can’t even keep up, your work is mediocre at best.”

Until that moment, I had not even had a full conversation with this woman. She was not my superior. We weren’t in the same department. We didn’t even cross paths.

I lost it.

I almost broke the bathroom door down trying to get in to tell Jim I was quitting on the spot. Then I sat my ass down at the computer, and very nicely responded to the e-mail, by telling this young woman to kindly kiss my ass, and this job can suck a nutsack. I quit.

Reply all.

That’s an awful lot of story packed into a short space, and I realize it’s just mine. But you know what? It’s true. I have no idea what happened. I don’t know what happened from days 1 through 65, and then 66 to 105, that made it end this way.

And I have been sufficiently bummed all to hell ever since.

This morning, while I was whining a bit about it on the facepage, my friend Jill mentioned that workplace bullying is a real thing. And until she wrote that, I had never once considered that was what was happening to me.

So I looked into it.

Did you know female to female workplace bullying is more common than any other kind? And a sign that you’re being bullied is that you’re given an impossible task of doing a new job without training or time to learn new skills, but that work is never good enough for the boss.

Just like the project I was handed, when I wasn’t really qualified to do it, and doing it meant that I had to ignore the rest of my job.

Others signs of workplace bullying:

You are constantly feeling agitated and anxious, experiencing a sense of doom, waiting for bad things to happen

No matter what you do, you are never left alone to do your job without interference

People feel justified screaming or yelling at you in front of others, but you are punished if you scream back

You are shocked when accused of incompetence, despite a history of objective excellence, typically by someone who cannot do your job

Everyone — co-workers, senior bosses, HR — agrees (in person and orally) that your tormentor is a jerk, but there is nothing they will do about it

I mean. Honestly. How did I not see that coming?

“Targets are more technically skilled than their bullies. They are the “go-to” veteran workers to whom new employees turn for guidance. Insecure bosses and co-workers can’t stand to share credit for the recognition of talent. Bully bosses steal credit from skilled targets.”

The Beast took credit for the increased social media traffic while denying that it had happened under my tenure. She told flat out lies about her involvement in my daily work, and she lied about my contributions.

“Targets are better liked, they have more social skills, and quite likely possess greater emotional intelligence. They have empathy (even for their bullies). Colleagues, customers, and management (with exception to the bullies and their sponsors) appreciate the warmth that the targets bring to the workplace.”

I was liked immediately. I even had empathy, right up until they lost their minds at me. I once offered to help out on a busy project, all the way up to fetching coffee. And you know what else? When it came to what I was doing, the writing, the learning, the posting… I was only getting better every day.

I was bullied.

My reaction was textbook. I was anxious. I cried. I just didn’t want to go to work. But I never thought about it in those terms. Because I’m not 16. I’m 39. I’m a 39-year-old woman who let a Beast and her toadies bully me right out of a perfectly good job that I was good at, and burn a bridge so far to the ground that the mythical phoenix itself ain’t ever rising out of that shit.

There were good things. My immediate supervisor was a good ear, and I found, hidden among the assholes, the uncool kids, a group of women who can’t seem to get on the Beast’s good side no matter what they do. They’re stuck, for one reason or another. And they’re being bullied.

I guess I figured that the whole bully thing was a good 25 years behind me, and that at this point in life, knowing who I am and how I am, I don’t seem — the type — to be bullied. But damn, y’all. People are dicks.

Now, for obvious reasons, I’m not going to actually SAY the name of my former employer. And for those of you who know it, how about you do me a favor and not get me sued, okay? It’s not really about them anyway. It’s about this nonsense. These assholes who wander the world as perfectly grown people who still decide to crap all over other people.

I didn’t really know it existed past a certain point in life. I can’t even pinpoint what triggered it, just that once it started, there was no stopping it. They were going to break me.

When I quit, the woman who had sent me the final e-mails replied, “Good. We need to get rid of dead weight.”

I don’t think she even knew my name.

I worked in news where I wrote stories about drug addicts who had stolen from their loved ones, and drunk drivers who had run over innocent people in the road. I’ve met men and women so petty that they’ll spend every last dime suing their former employers or their city leaders just to mess with them. I’ve been yelled at by strangers for standing in the wrong place. And once, when I lived in New Orleans, a complete stranger pushed me, with both hands, because I was in the way of where he wanted to walk.

I’ve always known people could be cold.

But I never realized they could be this openly, enthusiastically ugly.

Me – “But I have to spend money to look this good for you!” *waves arms in sexy motion around bod*

Jim – “Tough! Pay your way or get out!”

Me – “You are a killer of dreams.”

And just like that, my days of being a small town newspaper reporter were over.

Okay, it wasn’t quite like that, but I mean, it was kind of close. Let’s just say the times, they are a-changing. And in a move that I can only describe as good for the soul, the mind, the creative spirit, and the pocketbook, we decided to shop around to see if there were any other opportunities out there for me.

The assumption was that it would take months and months. No problem, I thought, I’ll send out some of my fancy resumes that I made with the fancy resume-maker that I found on the google, and then I’ll sit back and enjoy the summer. Hooray!

*ring*

Hello? Yes, this is Marney… An interview? Sure.

Y’all, I GOT A JOB. Like, lightning fast. I mean, it’s not that unusual seeing as I am a human bucket of awesome, but still. It was kind of cool.

So what does the writer who thinks that Sears is high class and TJ Maxx is legitimately swanky (dude, I bought a dress there with SEQUINS, hello!!) do when she leaves her writing job?

She gets a job as a writer. In high end fashion. Of course.

No really.

Technically, my title is “Social Media Manager” which means that I am in charge of all sorts of stuff that gets out to the public. You know, info and stuff. But I think what I really am, still, is a writer. It’s my job to write all about this kinda cool fashion and these fairly spectacular dresses that are all part of this line. They are like, cool.

See, my writing skills are coming in handy already!

Anyway, when you get a job in a place that creates fashion, you feel compelled to dress reasonably nice, even though they are clearly not turning to YOU for fashion advice seeing as they’ve been doing this a whole lot longer and oh yeah, there’s that whole Sears and TJ Maxx thing you got going on, as previously mentioned.

So this means I have become a girl who can not walk out of the house without getting approval from others on what goes on my bod. Via the selfie.

A “selfie” is hip cool youngfolk talk for “self portrait with your cell phone.” There are several types of selfies:

The demure “look how sweet I am, my hand is just naturally resting on my lip, showing off my wildly big ring and come hither expression, I wonder if anyone will ever know I had to take this photo 100 times to get it right for my Facebook profile photo” selfie.

The “hey maybe if I drop syrup on myself no one will notice how incredibly freaking skinny I am” selfie.

The “idiot duck face” selfie.

The “Amanda Bynes has lost her friggin’ mind” selfie.

The “watch me go from buff hottie to total douchebag simply by virtue of taking this photo” selfie.

And most important, the “check out what I am wearing” selfie. As you can see, it’s not just for the ladies who want to know if these flowered pants make their butt pop out (they do). It’s also for the gents who care about their self styling, like this fool and his bitchin’ 3/4 length tee.

It’s the last one here that I have officially fallen prey to. Apparently, I need to know how I look, and a glimpse at myself is just not enough.

This really happened:

If you are color blind, you cannot even tell that I am wearing something different everyday.

Apparently what has really changed isn’t my job. It’s my ability to leave the house without approval.

So there was this story going around on the facepage about some things that Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries said about the acceptable clientele of his over-priced trendy mall retail store. Mr. Jeffries, frankly, doesn’t want to see the fatties and uglies inside his store best known for near-naked models and one really annoying 90’s pop song.

“We go after the cool kids,” Jeffries told Salon. “We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

The article passed around on the facepage, which appeared on Elite Daily (and also ends suddenly and hilariously) explained further, but to break it down, basically, Mr. Jeffries said that Abercrombie & Fitch has a target audience, and that audience is skinny. And really, that was the jist of it. Mr. Jeffries associates skinny with young and pretty, so therefore if you are skinny, you belong in his trendy clothes. He wants people with washboard abs in his clothes. He never wants people in his clothes who do NOT have washboard abs as the people with washboard abs will apparently not want to be seen in the same clothing.

Side note – if I had washboard abs, I would NOT wear Abercrombie & Fitch. I’d wear a bra everywhere. So people could SEE MY WASHBOARD ABS. Sheesh.

Abercrombie & Fitch does not bother making bigger women’s sizes (though, they do for men, because male athletes are also super cool and worthy of wearing their line).

I gotta be honest. I had no idea. And mostly, I don’t really care. I don’t bother walking into Abercrombie & Fitch because the clothes on display in the windows are not at all my style, and seem overpriced, and it never occurred to me to walk inside and take a peek. I know I am dating myself, but to me, Abercrombie & Fitch kind of screams, “HEY! Are you the next preppy murderer?! Then you should dress yourself here!” I certainly don’t assume that the people who DO shop there are all in the “I hate uglies” club (or, for that matter, preppy murderers). Truth is, I love me some Walmart, and plenty of people write articles about the horrors of mean and terrible Walmart, and if I tried to care, I would fail, because I don’t.

So the CEO of this place is anti-overweight. Meh. Whatever.

But I do take issue with his assertion that the reason he markets to the skinnies is because they are all beautiful. It seems to imply that the fatties are all ugly. And I mean, come on now. Really? Really dude who looks like this:

Dude. You’re almost 70. And you are not fully fatty. But um, your neck rolls are not exactly screaming “young hot sexy.” I’m just sayin’.

The truth of it is, beauty is subjective. There is no description of beautiful. So when Mr. Jeffries states one, I think even HE knows that there is no possible way for it to be effective or accurate. He is practically 70, so he is clearly old enough to know there are ugly skinny people in the world, be it because they are physically unattractive or just their personalities are offensive to general humankind. I know he gets it. So heck, maybe he was just making sure to say some wacko stuff to make sure that his brand remains relevant. After all, Abercrombie & Fitch appeared to struggle in 2012, with weak sales and plans to start shutting stores. So hey, say something CRAY-CRAY (see what I did there?) and they will come, even to protest, but there’s no such thing as bad publicity.